


It's Only a Matter of Time

by hollimichele



Series: Don't Be Shocked When Your Hist'ry Book Mentions Me [12]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda, Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: F/M, The Plot Thickens, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-22 23:13:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6097115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollimichele/pseuds/hollimichele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Oh! I thought you’d come out the other side —”</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Only a Matter of Time

The day, when it came, was chill and damp, a gray, dispiriting day. Nonetheless, Eliza set out at nine o’clock. She had planned to go alone, but she found herself trailed by a flock of granddaughters and great-nieces, each insisting that they did not mind the cold at all.

She had a compass and a map, folded up and tucked into one voluminous sleeve. These new modes were absurd, but Eliza could not complain of having somewhere to store things; pockets had been out of fashion for entirely too long. Her granddaughters were a rustle of starched petticoats behind her, but she did not turn, and she did not need the map.

After an hour’s walk, the least timid of the girls began to ask if she was quite warm enough, if she was certain of the way, if she would not like to stop and rest. Eliza tolerated their concern, but refused the extra wrap and the thicker gloves and the still-warm coffee, packed carefully in a picnic hamper.

When she finally lost her temper, she snapped, “I’m eighty, not eight; nor am I made of glass!” The girls looked so abashed, though, that she relented, and accepted the gloves and a tin mug of coffee. 

They only wanted to look after her. She understood the impulse.

Eliza could not say how she knew that they’d arrived. It was a knack she could not explain and could not command: sometimes she knew where, and when, something important would be. Her attempts to quantify it further had met with little success, but when she felt the tug of it, she’d never once regretted following.

On this day, it had led her to a clearing in the woods, ringed by bare trees. There was nothing in it at first glance, but Eliza frowned, studied the air before her, and began to pace the perimeter of the clearing. The granddaughters and great-nieces straggled to a halt, watching her with wide eyes.

Three-quarters of the way around, she spotted it: a change in the quality of light at the center of the clearing. As though a window had opened in the air, and on the other side of it was springtime. 

Eliza gathered her skirts and walked straight towards it, swift and certain.

She heard a chorus of soft gasps behind her, in the instant before she stepped through, but she paid them no mind. The edge of the window was a little above the ground, and she stepped carefully over it. For an instant she had one foot on wet, dead leaves, and one on fresh green grass.

Then she was through, standing in a sunlit forest clearing, looking around at the bright new growth all about her. Turning, she looked back through the window at the gray wet woods, the girls clutching their pelisses and watching, awestruck. And then she heard a voice, the dear familiar voice that she had hoped for:

“Oh! I thought you’d come out the other side —”

And Alexander came barreling around the window towards her.

He swept her up in an embrace, clutching her tight, and she returned it with equal fervor. They were both of them too overcome to say anything coherent, for that first little while; even Alexander’s eloquence quite deserted him. Instead they both wept and clung and said nonsense to each other: “oh, my love!” and “I am so —” and “forgive me” and “never thought —” and things of that nature.

When they had recovered themselves a little, Alexander pulled back — not so far as to let her go, but enough to look wonderingly into her face. “Look at you,” he said.

Eliza felt self-consciousness wash over her all at once. “I’m old,” she said, and indeed she felt it. Alexander looked no older than he had when she had seen him last, and perhaps even in better health. His face was rosier, the shadows in it fewer, and he was not so thin and drawn as he had been, their last few years together.

But Alexander shook his head. “You are astonishing, Betsey. Magnificent. Leading me here, at such a remove — I hardly dared hope it would work.”

Eliza surprised them both by bursting into tears again. Then Alexander kissed her and said more soothing nonsense until she quieted, so she felt it worth doing. “I was afraid you wouldn’t find it,” she admitted. “I have been hoping for so long. Seeing you again... it is worth anything.”

She remembered the next part of her task, then. “Here,” she said, and tugged the bundle of letters out of her sleeve. “We haven’t much longer — the window won’t last — but I have been writing to you, since I knew I might have this chance.” She held them out, but he did not take them: only looked at them, and then back at her face.

“But surely I’ll come back with you?” Alexander said. “I mean — that is to say I thought —”

Eliza’s heart had been broken before, and by worse, so this was not enough to shatter it. It was enough for a tremor, though; enough that she felt it crack. “Oh, my love,” she said. “I wish you could.”

“But I can,” he insisted. “Why should I not?” And he stepped towards the window, away from Eliza, until she caught his hand and stopped him at the threshold.

“Look,” she said, “look, that is why you can’t —” and he turned back to see the woods around them flicker like a candle in a drafty room, as though the world itself were in danger of going out in a puff of smoke at any moment.

“Oh, no,” he said softly.

“You can’t unweave time so much,” she said. “The whole thing comes apart. It was selfish of me to do even this. I cannot stay much longer.” On her side of the window, the granddaughters and great-nieces were beginning to flicker as well.

Alexander pulled her close again, and kissed her. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry. I thought I’d have time to tell you everything, to make amends for leaving you. I should have written it all down,” he added, mouth twisting — a joke they both understood perfectly well, and found no joy in.

But this, at least, she could fix. “There’s instructions, in one of the letters,” she told him. “Another hole in time like this one, but smaller. Enough to send a message back to me. You’ll have a month or so, I think. What year is it, here?”

“It’s March, of two thousand and sixteen — an early spring,” he told her. “The world is so changed, Eliza, I hardly know where to begin. Our whole world is gone, transformed entirely.”

“But you’re well?” she asked. “You’re not alone?”

“Not alone,” he said. “But lonely, in truth. I miss you, all of you —”

“I know,” Eliza said. “I think I’ll always miss you. But I’m not alone; I’ve got our family. And knowing you’re alive — that you’ll be alive — that will have to be enough.”

“I love you,” he told her. “I’ll write it all down, all I can manage.”

“I know you will,” she told him. “I’ve already read it.”

The astonished look on his face upon hearing that, transforming into delight as he understood her meaning, was worth everything. Eliza kissed him and held him tight, one last time, and pressed her letters into his hands. “There may be something else I can do,” she told him. “You’ll have warning, if I manage it. I love you. Goodbye, Alexander,” she said, and stepped back through the window.

They stood there looking at each other for a moment, on opposite sides of time, before the window closed and took him with it. There was only the cold gray clearing left, and Eliza standing alone in the center of it.

The moment broke in a wave of granddaughters, surging forward to surround her with soothing words and handkerchiefs and exclamations. Eliza did not need them, though. She took out her map, and carefully marked the location of the clearing, a little off from its predicted spot; she was dry-eyed, and remained so for the long walk back. The girls murmured to each other about how perfectly romantic it had been, and how sad, and she pretended not to hear them.

Eliza let them set the pace, and fell to the back of the group. She caught one of the girls by the sleeve, as she passed — and this one, she recalled, was neither a granddaughter nor a great-niece, but a young lady from the orphanage, taken under the family’s wing.

“How are your studies progressing?” Eliza asked the girl, who blushed under her regard.

“Very well, ma’am,” she said. “I’m writing a spell of my own. To retrieve lost things.”

“So I have heard,” Eliza said, prompting another blush. “I’m told you show a great deal of promise.”

“Oh, well,” said the girl, smiling, “it only works half the time, and only for very small things. I used it for a bracelet I’d misplaced and had a sick headache for the rest of the day.”

“Still, I’m sure you’ll perfect it eventually,” said Eliza.

“I think so,” the girl agreed. “Everything works out, given enough time, doesn’t it?”

“In my experience, it nearly always does,” Eliza said. “If you keep at it.”

Ten years before, Eliza had visited her husband’s grave. She’d been full of bitterness: at being left alone, at her inability to wake Alexander from the sleep of death she’d placed upon him with Angelica. Not enough magic, not enough skill. But as she turned to leave, she had felt that faint tug of certainty, and gone into the church instead.

She sat in a back pew for nearly an hour, more certain every moment that _something_ would happen, less certain every moment of what it would be. And then the feeling evaporated. Eliza nearly wept with disappointment — but then, when she rose to leave, there was a parcel wrapped in brown paper on the seat beside her, where there had been none before.

It had her name on it, in handwriting she knew.

Eliza still had it, hidden in a secret compartment of her vanity. A fat notebook crammed with Alexander’s writing, with a few precious images of the world he would one day inhabit tucked between the pages. Eliza had only later read of Mssr. Daugerre’s work — how miraculous, to see its result before knowing the cause!

It was the writing she treasured most, though. _My love, I have awoken into a world of wonders_ , the first lines read, _but I would trade them in an instant to be by your side_.

He tried to put a brave face on it, but she knew him too well. The wonders of the future weren’t enough. The assurance of his own legacy wasn’t enough. The new friends he made, she could tell, went some way to easing the loss, but even they could not be enough.

But her own future was set. In the back of the notebook, he’d tucked a folded card. On the front, it read: _Eliza, here is a marvel for you. Do not open this in company, unless you trust them with foreknowledge. This is a song that will be sung in a play about us, by an actress playing your part, whose great-grandparents will not yet have been born when you listen to it. I think she does you justice._

Eliza only allowed herself to listen to it sparingly, after the first few times. She did not want to exhaust whatever mechanism powered it. But it buoyed her spirits to know that the work she set herself to would last, would be worthwhile. 

It was not enough in recompense for the loss of Alexander, of course. But he had left her their family, and their future. If she worried, it was for him, alone in a strange world.

The years passed; Eliza lived. As she grew older she thought more about the tangled threads of time: how they were interwoven, or interrupted, or ended too soon. Which ones could be cut, or rearranged. She made plans, and set in motion events she knew she would not live to see. She was careful; she was patient.

She had, with the right perspective, all the time in the world. She used it.

**Author's Note:**

> Sadly, this story did not give me nearly enough opportunities to throw shade at 1830s fashion. Otherwise, I have no complaints.


End file.
